PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON THE WAR-PATH. 777 



pretation which he ascribes to two eminent divines of the Church 

 of England are or are not fair and correct summaries of their 

 teaching. Fortunately, on this subject we are not at the mercy 

 of any individual divines whether living or dead. The Christian 

 Church, with its long and varied history of nearly two thousand 

 years, has never been committed to it. The doctrine indeed of 

 verbal inspiration, though never defined and never authoritatively 

 adopted by any Christian Church, has been often widely prevalent. 

 But even this doctrine is exaggerated, distorted, and made ridicu- 

 lous by its development in the hands of Prof. Huxley. As patron- 

 ized by him, the law of interpretation applied to some of the most 

 ancient records of our race would exclude all the elements of alle- 

 gory and of metaphor, of imagery, of parable, and of accommo- 

 dated presentation. And this, too, when some of these records 

 purport to set before us an idea of the origin of things. The 

 argument is not only illogical but grotesque, that because Chris- 

 tianity claims to be an historical religion, therefore it follows 

 that any accepted narrative attempting to give us some con- 

 ception of the creative work, must do so in words as literal and 

 prosaic as an account of the execution of Charles I. * Cre- 

 ation, strictly speaking, is inconceivable to us. And yet creation 

 is a fact. The system of visible things in which we live was cer- 

 tainly not the author of itself. If we are capable at all of receiv- 

 ing any mental impression of its beginnings we can only do so 

 through modes of representation which are charged with allegory. 

 In his own special science no man has declared more clearly than 

 Prof. Huxley that the limits of our observation are not the limits 

 of our knowledge. Biology, for example, declares as its verdict, 

 after much evidence has been taken, that, as matters now stand, 

 the living is never generated by the not-living. Every form of 

 organic life comes from some other older form which has already 

 been established. But he points out that this has no adverse bear- 

 ing upon the deductive conclusion that life must have had its first 

 beginning otherwise. On the contrary, he admits that conclusion 

 to be certain. " If," says he, " the hypothesis of evolution is true, 

 living matter must have arisen from not-living matter." f I 

 venture to add that whether the theory of evolution be true or 

 false, or whether (as is more likely) it be partly true and partly 

 false, the certainty of this conclusion is not affected. But if that 

 beginning is to be rendered conceivable by us, it can not be ex- 

 pressed in the language of experience. We have no experience 

 to go upon. Of necessity, therefore, the very idea of a beginning 

 must be dealt with in the language of metaphor or allegory. 

 Accordingly, even Darwin was compelled to have recourse to the 



* Page V. f Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth edition, vol. iii, Biology, p. 689. 



